I read slow.

I do.  I’ve been trying to decide how urgent I should feel about remedying this.  For now I’m letting my decision be constrained by the fact that I hardly have any time to read at all, much less learn how to read fast.  Maybe the logic on that is backwards.  Maybe necessity is the mother of invention and I’ll start reading fast as soon as I want to read as bad as you wanted air that time when I plunged your head unexpectedly into the Mediterranean and held it there until you went blue, young grasshopper.

But there are perks to reading slow.  I’m thinking of this because I’m ruminating (a welcome byproduct of slow reading; some books, I feel, need to suffuse the pot roast in my mind over a long time.  To marinate my brain to tender, succulent perfection.  For the zombies.) on how long it’s taking me to read the book I’m in, which is fine because I’ll be a little sorry when I finish it.  I will read it again sometime, but there is magic in first discovery.  It’s a collection of essays - Leaping - by Brian Doyle.  Max got me into Brian Doyle, and Pat Madden got him into him, and I tried to get my friend’s mother into him but she was unimpressed; she said she’s already read these ideas before, at this point in her life she needs to read something new.  She mainly seems to like books about divorce and infidelity and homosexuality.  Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that.

And maybe when I’m her age I will also be bored by the wide-eyed, full-throated abundant roar of vitality that is Brian Doyle’s Catholic prose, but I sure hope not.  I hope will never get tired of hearing that basic and simple refrain God is good, day after day, raucous loud and ardent soft, through the voices of ten thousand of His flawed and gorgeous kids.  That flawless and gorgeous one, too.